Romeo wrote:
As for not taking defenses against them, I always take ten of each defense, which is usually enough against Beam and Kinetics, not-so-hot against missiles.

You do so in multiplayer too ? I'm going to do advanced testing to see if a kinectics oriented is possible

DeamonStorm wrote:
First, if this is in the wrong place, I apologize.



Okay, so I have had chance to play a couple of games in MP now and the experience is so different from SP. This is how it should be of course. However, I have noticed a rather alarming trend. People will build ships with nothing, NOTHING, but the best missiles they have available. While I know that all is viable in the MP game and if they want to they can, but, its kind of unbalancing. When this happens, it becomes more a war of attrition and who expanded faster first, rather than actual tactics and strategies. You could have a well established core of systems, good tech and ships and then along comes someone with Dreadnaughts loaded out with 30-40 missiles and nothing else, all loaded in a fleet with over 40k in military points. Its just...boring, because the only real counter is either to make similar ships, or, load your ships with nothing but Flak.



The first option is just pointless, its becomes a simple case of who as the larger fleet and number of military points in said fleet. I havent tried building ships with just Flak on them, because it makes the ship pointless. I would like to know what others think about this and if anyone actually agrees with me.

No, I wouldn't say so, because of the way flak/missile defence is implemented.





Missiles and torpedoes are, as you note, very powerful per each munition, and as such if they hit they can easily blast ships out of the sky. I love this, though - it's a well balanced mechanic that necessitates actual action and rapid adaptation by any player/AI who doesn't want their fleets to be utterly wiped out:

• Missiles have a large damage per munition, yes - but each missile module fires only a small amount of them each round.
• Add to this the fact that flak defences of the same level and in decent amounts can negate almost ALL incoming missiles - proper investment in flak defences really does show as those missiles explode harmlessly before reaching you.
• Add to this the correct usage of defensive/sabotage cards against enemies you know are toting a lot of missiles
• Add to this retrofitting your fleet to re-balance defences against missiles

And you can then pretty much go through any enemy missile-based fleet almost without taking damage; and I feel this sums up missiles nicely: They're capable of doing devastating damage, but they're also a riskier card to play than Lasers or Cannons, because:

• If the enemy has good defences (as detailed above), he can become completely impervious to missiles. Doing the same with shields or deflection is a lot harder.
• Because you have less projectiles per salvo, any amount of defence or inaccuracy means missiles can be far less reliable than cannons or beams.
• If you don't manage to wipe an enemy in long/medium range, they're almost worthless in melee

Using mass-missiles against an enemy, then, is a high-reward but very risky strategy, as if you don't get things absolutely right, their usage can handicap your own fleet.







All in all, I love how missiles feel and think a nerf would be a shame and would serve to make the game blander. All I'd like to see, perhaps, is the AI to be a bit more intelligent with regards to adapting their ship designs to counter missile-heavy attacks, both by other AIs and the player.



Addendum: Can't say much for MP, not got any experience yet - but I still feel the design of missiles is good, all that's needed is a slight discouragement somewhere in the mechanics for players to spam missile-laden skeleton ships (or any simplistic spam design, really, not just missiles), not a full on nerf to the way missiles work. Perhaps a slight increase to the industry cost of missile modules compared to cannon and beams, to reflect their warhead potency? Stress on slight.

Bwa ha ha, just making sure!

Romeo wrote:
Just as a friendly tip, if you focus your fleets entirely on one damage type, you can overwhelm defenses much, much quicker (Especially if you have numerical supremacy). If nothing else, always focus the firepower of a ship in one way (As in, don't put Kinetics, Beams and Missiles on the same ship, you'll let them use every defense against you).

I focus the weapons on single ship types, as per usual.



And then have fleets use combinations of these focused types.



Essentially the goal is to force the predictable AI into using defenses for 1 or 2 weapon types, leaving the last weapon type 100% effective, and reducing the available tonnage space on enemy ships by filling it with defenses.



And seeing as I auto-battle every time, I don't really have to deal with the time issue.



I think I have got this one buddy, but thanks anyway.

Igncom1 wrote:
Kinetics by them selves would be suicide.



I prefer to have my fleets mixed with all three weapons:



Beam: Glass counter cannon



Missile: Glass cannon



Kinetic: Tank or well armored mothership

Just as a friendly tip, if you focus your fleets entirely on one damage type, you can overwhelm defenses much, much quicker (Especially if you have numerical supremacy). If nothing else, always focus the firepower of a ship in one way (As in, don't put Kinetics, Beams and Missiles on the same ship, you'll let them use every defense against you).

ThatMG wrote:
Missile are not OP, this thread is excessive bickering and ruins games.



Missile boats are able to be countered in ways listed (more flakk higher tech flak, boni to defences module/trait)



Nerfing missiles into the ground wont balance the game it will just make people use beams instead (e.g moving goal posts)



Also your playing a strategy game EXPECT there will be a BEST thing to do/most common, if you don't like this stop playing strategy games and games in general.



MP endless space isn't serious anyway and nerfing missiles because x players are only making ships with missiles is dumb AND will hurt single player/normal ships with missiles.



Then all these MP whiners will QQ beam is to powerful and the cycle repeats (seriously its like some portion of of the gaming community would be better off in some room somewhere hitting each other with soft pillows)

Oooh boy, where to start:



Missile are overpowered compared to the other two. It is possible to survive against Kinetics and Beams all three rounds. Missiles will often annihilate most of a fleet in the opening salvo.



Compared with Deflectors and Shields, Flak doesn't scale nearly as well (Ten Deflectors can render you virtually immune to Kinetics, and ten Shields can mitigate most of the damage from a Beam vessel; A missile boat will still light you up with ten Flak, meaning you need to focus exclusively on that defense, which is a waste of valuable space).



No one here is asking them to be "nerfed in to the ground". Kinetics need a boost, and Missiles need to be leashed somewhat.



Did... Did you actually just support broken balance? By that logic, the Economy exploit for the Sisters of Battle in Dawn of War was a good thing. Hey, everyone do this one tactic! Because you know what's super fun? Having to do the same thing every god damn game.



They're still overpowered in Singleplayer too. I don't play Multiplayer, and I find them ridiculous. So... Logic fail.



And will balance ever be perfect? No, but that's no excuse to ignore it. The objective isn't to nerf them until Beams are king and everything else sucks. The point is to try and bring them to a point where Missiles, Beams and Kinetics are all viable options. As in, nothing like what we have now.

People do complain about beams already don't you know?



Really Its better to leave them both to counter each other.





And ThatMG, don't be so aggressive, the devs know that case here, and the poll already states that the majority of the community does as well.



So please tone down the aggression, there is no need for it and it can be considered as a little rude.



Thanks.

Missile are not OP, this thread is excessive bickering and ruins games.



Missile boats are able to be countered in ways listed (more flakk higher tech flak, boni to defences module/trait)



Nerfing missiles into the ground wont balance the game it will just make people use beams instead (e.g moving goal posts)



Also your playing a strategy game EXPECT there will be a BEST thing to do/most common, if you don't like this stop playing strategy games and games in general.



MP endless space isn't serious anyway and nerfing missiles because x players are only making ships with missiles is dumb AND will hurt single player/normal ships with missiles.



Then all these MP whiners will QQ beam is to powerful and the cycle repeats (seriously its like some portion of of the gaming community would be better off in some room somewhere hitting each other with soft pillows)

Possibly, What do you base that off?



Do you enemy's use gratuitous amounts of flak?

I actually think that missiles are underpowered.

Am I the only one?

Kinetics by them selves would be suicide.



I prefer to have my fleets mixed with all three weapons:



Beam: Glass counter cannon



Missile: Glass cannon



Kinetic: Tank or well armored mothership

PanH wrote:
You do so in multiplayer too ? I'm going to do advanced testing to see if a kinectics oriented is possible

Nah, I never play multiplayer. Couldn't imagine having to sit for that many hours straight. At least I can walk away in single-player.

I think they would be fine if ship HP was higher so more fights made it to phase 3.

Hissho have a special Kinetics weapon which does a lot more damage per salvo, but is ultimately still inaccurate as all hell. As for not taking defenses against them, I always take ten of each defense, which is usually enough against Beam and Kinetics, not-so-hot against missiles. One can select two levels of "Sniper" from faction traits which does up the usefulness of Kinetics and Beams considerably (Allows Kinetics to be semi-useful in the second round, which can make quite a bit of difference). The damage boost is next-to-useless on Kinetics thanks to the low damage-per-shot.

Romeo wrote:
Nah, you were spot on: Kinetics are always useless. If you pick "Sniper", you're better off with lasers (Kill them through attrition). If you go for damage, you're better off with missiles (Kill them in the first round). If you have both, you can realistically pick either, though missiles are more consistent killers. But Kinetics are always inferior.

Well, as everyone consider kinectic as useless, it results that no one ever take shield against them. If you can stack enough accuracy (or isn't there special kinectics that are more accurate ? With hissho I think), maybe you could use this.

PanH wrote:
Well, I guess they can pretty much get a statu quo against a normal fleet.



And personally, all my fleets are designed in the aim of fighting an enemy, using lots of retrofitting if I have enough . The paper rock scissors is not with missiles/lasers/kinectic, it's more with destroyers fleet/mothership (or opposite, as said)/normal fleet. Especially as kinectic is pretty useless (although someone could use that, maybe with a lot of accuracy)

Nah, you were spot on: Kinetics are always useless. If you pick "Sniper", you're better off with lasers (Kill them through attrition). If you go for damage, you're better off with missiles (Kill them in the first round). If you have both, you can realistically pick either, though missiles are more consistent killers. But Kinetics are always inferior.

n18991c wrote:
Perhaps not very realistic but possibly a necessity nevertheless. One could argue, perhaps, that with the mothership destroyed the missiles' targeting systems don't function any longer...

In that case, it would be logical to have a research where missiles do continue (as they do now) instead of just blowing up, or losing tracking after the mothership is destroyed. (Research for On-board missile tracking).

Well, I guess they can pretty much get a statu quo against a normal fleet.



And personally, all my fleets are designed in the aim of fighting an enemy, using lots of retrofitting if I have enough . The paper rock scissors is not with missiles/lasers/kinectic, it's more with destroyers fleet/mothership (or opposite, as said)/normal fleet. Especially as kinectic is pretty useless (although someone could use that, maybe with a lot of accuracy)

PanH wrote:
Yea, I wasn't sure if it was still the case. But it has been (I remember it in Beta at least). Although, as I said, that could work, with big ships serving of shield, and the smalls of firepower.

Aye, it does work, just, backwards (Use the battleships as tanks, send droves of glass cannon little ships as firepower).



Only works against small fleet counts, mind you. Also annoying in the sense you have to create a fleet whose sole purpose is to try and survive a brutally over-powered mechanic (They'll be useless against any "normal" fleet).

Romeo wrote:
This is not the case, by any stretch. Your most powerful (Military power) ships are listed at the top, which means their most powerful (Again, Military power) ships will target your most powerful and vice-versa. Unless you manage to get a small class to be the most powerful (Highly unlikely) your large ships will be targetted first.

Yea, I wasn't sure if it was still the case. But it has been (I remember it in Beta at least). Although, as I said, that could work, with big ships serving of shield, and the smalls of firepower.

PanH wrote:
I don't know if it stills the case, but I remember that little ships were being aimed at before big ships. So, it was possible to easily counter the destroyers/glass canon build.

What I did was that : 1 (or more, with more cp) big ship loaded with only weapons (eventually a fleet repair), and lots of little ships, that only carry defenses. The idea is a mothership, with a fleet of little ships protecting it. If correctly balanced, destroyers are near to inefficient against it. It's one of the few fleet that i've seen not resulting in a 1fleet winner/1 fleet destroyed, but still taking the advantage over destroyers fleet. It was destroying half of the destroyers each time, for 2-3 "protectors" killed.



Of course, that would work even better with big ships aimed first, as they are more resistant.

This is not the case, by any stretch. Your most powerful (Military power) ships are listed at the top, which means their most powerful (Again, Military power) ships will target your most powerful and vice-versa. Unless you manage to get a small class to be the most powerful (Highly unlikely) your large ships will be targetted first.

ThatMG wrote:
Its not over powered, people who whine get devs to nerf stuff that ultimately ruins games, nerfing never fixes anything anyway it just moves the goal posts as it were, instead of whining learn to counter them some other way.



Also your playing a strategy game EXPECT there will be a BEST thing to do/ most common, if you don't like this stop playing strategy games.



Also really this game has NO COMPETITIVE SCENE and I don't think the devs intended it to be ever. Even the most comp games are ultimately broken because they have an "illusion of balance"



The only balanced game in existence is noughts a crosses Guess what happens nobody wins in a balanced game its always a draw unless someone brain farts.



use higher tech flak / make ships with less weapons and more anti w/e their using



its fairly easy to make a custom races that has +15% to def modules in addition to the modules that give you the same.



The type of people who whine something is op is the same people who after the devs nerf X will whine Y is now op



Also it hurts people who don't even play MP who might enjoy putting 30-40 missile on one ship and looking at the bright pixels and stuff

While I agree that excessive bickering tends to ruin games, I disagree in blatent cases. It's not a matter of "learning to counter" something over-powered, because I'd be an idiot not to simply do it myself and gain that advantage.



Imagine a shooter where one weapon had no recoil, a large clip and could kill with one bullet. Sure, I could counter by hiding behind a corner with a shotgun, or trying to eliminate them from extremely far away with a sniper, but ultimately those would be band-aid solutions. The proper solution would be to fix the original weapon, not tell players to "deal with it".